


A Gift for Rosie

by redbuttonhole



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Adultery, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gothic, Holmes Family, Incest, Psychological Horror, adult incest, s4 compliant, the holmes family has some more skeletons in their closet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 14:31:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10721232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbuttonhole/pseuds/redbuttonhole
Summary: Mycroft, by the way, advised me not to tell you anything of this affair beyond the bare minimum.  He seems to think you'll react badly, and I can't help but grant that he is probably correct...  But you're family now, John.  It's time you learned exactly what that means.





	A Gift for Rosie

**Author's Note:**

> Rating this Mature because of the discussion of incest, but there are no sex scenes in this fic, graphic or otherwise. Everything happens off-screen. Also, all the incest occurs between adults.
> 
> I'm pretty sure this is canon compliant with everything up through The Final Problem?

Dear John,

I know you don't like it when I run off without explanation, but I couldn't imagine explaining all this to you in person, so this note will have to suffice.  First, to settle your fears: I won't be gone long this time—a few days, perhaps a week at the most.  It isn't for a case, and I will encounter no real danger.

I have gone to collect a gift for Rosie.  A gift for all of us, really, but especially for her.  As to the nature of the gift, that requires a bit of explanation.

Mycroft, by the way, advised me not to tell you anything of this affair beyond the bare minimum.  He seems to think you'll react badly, and I can't help but grant that he is probably correct.  He suggested that I simply disappear for a few days, and present the gift to you upon my return without commentary.  He prefers to leave you to your own deductions, which he is sure would be more comfortable for you than the truth.  But Mycroft has always underestimated you.  I know you better—I know that you won't be satisfied with evasions and half-truths.  Besides, you're family now.  It's time you learned exactly what that means.

You remember that night you spent at Musgrave, trapped by my sister in that well.  You told me then that Mycroft had lied to us: as many secrets as he revealed about Eurus's childhood, there were some he kept to himself.  Redbeard's true identity was one.  You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that there are a few more. 

Left to his own devices, I don't think Mycroft would ever have told me what he knew.  It was he, after all, who encouraged me to delete those memories in the first place.  Eurus never told me either—at least, not in words.  Mycroft believed that these old family secrets were safe as long as Eurus wasn't speaking, but he's a philistine who never had much patience for music.  Gradually, over the course of months, I came to realise that Eurus wasn't simply giving me violin lessons.  She was revealing herself to me by way of her playing, and extending a long-delayed invitation through our duets.

As Eurus must have intuited would happen, the familiar music revived certain memories that Mycroft believed he had successfully excised from my mind.  At first, I didn't trust them myself—I thought I must be falling prey to my sister's considerable powers of suggestion and manipulation.  But eventually, as the images and events became clearer, I was able to piece together the rest through logic and deduction.  Even then, I preferred to believe for a while that I'd created the whole story out of my over-dramatic imagination.  But finally, I forced Mycroft (under great duress) to admit that my deductions had brought me very close to a truth he has spent his entire life concealing.  At last, he was prevailed upon to fill in the remaining holes in the story.

Forgive me if I'm being a bit circuitous in my explanations.  It's proving harder than I anticipated to be direct about this revelation.  A part of me wants to delay forever, so you might never have to bear the weight of this knowledge.  But the truth of my family history has been kept in darkness too long.  It's time we cast some light upon it.

Eurus, it turns out, is important to this story, but she is not the beginning of it.  The rot in the Holmes family tree goes back further.  Or rather, to be precise, not the Holmes family tree, but the Vernets – my mother's family.  "So there were three Holmes kids," you marvelled when you found out about Eurus.  But you were wrong, John.  Despite the name on her birth certificate, Eurus was never a Holmes at all.  She is a Vernet, through and through. 

By all accounts that I can trace, the Vernets were known to be a family of bohemian mongrels—one side of the family contained a slumming aristocrat, the other a French artist, and there were rumours of Jewish or Roma heritage, dating back to the days when such things were spoken about in hushed tones.

By the time Mummy and Rudy came into the picture, there wasn't much money, power, or position to speak of, but the family took pride in the sharp intelligence and fanciful eccentricity that appeared to be hereditary traits.  These traits were particularly strong in Mummy and her brother, and they seemed to become intensified by their somewhat unusual relationship. 

They grew up in a rural environment, with only each other for companionship.  Mummy's predilection for all things mathematical showed itself early, as did Rudy's flair for the dramatic.  Along with each others' clothes, they also shared an obsession with scientific experimentation.  Knowing me as you do, it will perhaps not surprise you to learn that their little experiments often tested the limits of good sense and conventional ethics. 

They worked with the tools available to them—not test tubes and microscopes, but the plants, insects, and farm animals that were part of their everyday life.  Rudy, it seems, developed a fascination for genetics and breeding.  Honey bees were a particular delight to him, as you could produce considerable genetic shifts in a relatively short period, thanks to the frequency of their generations.  Animals provided more frustration—it could take many generations to develop and encourage a desired trait using ordinary breeding methods. 

There were, of course, certain "tricks of the trade" Rudy picked up from the local farmers that were known to speed up the process.  More on that later. 

The children grew up.  Rudy, having sufficiently impressed the headmaster at the local grammar school, went off to Oxford, and my mother followed a year later at Cambridge.  It was the first time they were separated for more than a day, though I gather they kept up a vibrant correspondence (all long since burned by my brother).

Rudy, with his passion for genetics, had developed a plan for the two of them—a plan he believed my mother shared.  They were to search diligently through their classmates for two—a female and a male—who possessed an intelligence that approximately matched their own.  Then they would each marry these subjects, and soon enough begin a new experiment in breeding—his hypothesis being that the combination of carefully selected genes would produce offspring with a mental capacity that surpassed even their own. 

Rudy was, to put it mildly, disappointed when my mother fell in love with and subsequently married my father, whom he took for a bit of an idiot.  This is an overstatement—our father is of above average intelligence, but it's true that he was hardly the match Rudy had envisioned. But Daddy was fascinated and admiring of Mummy's genius, and she was flattered by his attentions.  Nothing Rudy said could dissuade her from marrying him. 

The next part of the story is known to you.  Mummy delayed having children for a number of years while she focused on her academic career.  Eventually, her name sufficiently established, she and Daddy pulled together the resources to buy Musgrave.  They were playing at being aristocrats—the kind of life she and Rudy had only dreamed about as children.  Mummy had the idea to instal the rather morbid "folly" you will recall from the grounds: a fake graveyard full of imagined ancestors with impossible names and dates.  Rudy at this time was in London, pursuing his career in government, but he came to visit frequently, often living with Mummy and Daddy for months at a time. 

Into this somewhat unconventional idyll was born first Mycroft, and then myself.  In the meanwhile, Rudy kept up hope in his little experiment, and searched for a suitable mate to bear his own children and test his theories.  But even among the elites of Oxbridge and MI6, this proved difficult, and Rudy came to despair of finding a woman who met his exacting standards.  Indeed, the only woman he ever met whose brilliance he deemed worthy of his own was my mother, his sister. 

For most people, this would have represented a dead end, but Rudy was not most people.  Proud of his eccentricities and impervious to social convention, he came up with a...  let's call it a _creative_ solution to his problem.  Among the farmers of his childhood acquaintance, there was a practise known as inbreeding—risky if performed without due care, but if practised deliberately, Rudy knew it could result in the intensification of desirable traits in only one generation. 

What happened when he first shared this line of thinking with my mother, I doubt we'll ever know.  Rudy isn't around to explain, and neither Mycroft nor I relishes the idea of discussing it with her.  But given how soon Eurus was born after me, I don't imagine it took him long to overcome any innate horror she might have felt at the suggestion.  In fact, it may have been her idea in the first place—the siblings were so in tune with each other, sometimes it could be difficult to say who was more responsible for their shared obsessions. 

Knowing what I do of them both, I suspect that the conception was achieved through artificial means, rather than the more natural (or in this case, some might say "dreadfully _un_ natural") methods.  But again, it's impossible to know with any certainty.  All I know for sure is that nine months later, Eurus was born—my father apparently none the wiser about her true parentage. 

The experiment must have seemed a great success at first.  The hypothesis was born out—Eurus did indeed show even more of the Vernet genius than Mycroft or I had.  Gradually, it became clear that the Vernet tendency toward eccentricity was also enhanced, but in a young child, this seemed like a small thing.

This next bit is conjecture on my part, but I believe it a solid one.  Mycroft had early on developed an interest in the conclusions that could be drawn from close observation of human subjects—what you have referred to as, "the deduction thing."  He shared his methods with both me and Eurus, our sister showing a particular skill at the game.  I believe that, in turning this skill on our own family, Eurus deduced at a very young age the truth of her origins. 

To an adolescent or an adult, such a discovery would surely have been deeply horrifying.  But Eurus was still a child, and growing up at Musgrave, she was largely unaware of the cultural taboos around incest and adultery.  In any case, if she was at all disturbed by the realisation, no one in the family remarked on it. 

The only evidence I have for this theory is my memory that around this time, Eurus invited me into her room for a solemn tea ceremony, and explained that she intended to marry me once we were grown. 

Shocking as this may seem with hindsight, you must grant that there was nothing particularly troubling about her statement at the time.  For my part, I had no objection to the plan—I loved my sister dearly, and I knew no other females near my own age.  When we announced our intentions to the adults, they were charmed, just as you were when Rosie, not so long ago, announced that she intended to "marry Daddy".  My research has indicated that such statements are perfectly normal for children at a certain developmental stage. 

Mycroft was the only one who sensed a whiff of the perverse in the declaration.  He had silently come to his own conclusions about Eurus's parentage, and being significantly older than us, he was far more aware of implications.  Not long after, he cornered Eurus and demanded to know what she intended with this plan.  Innocent of any impropriety in the idea, Eurus shamelessly explained to him her admiration for Uncle Rudy's genetic experiment in perfecting human intelligence, and her desire to continue it for another generation.  _Just imagine,_ said the budding scientist, _what a spectacular specimen my brother and I might produce!_ Apparently her only misgiving was that she would be forced to breed with a mere half-brother, corrupted by the Holmes DNA.  She would have preferred another full Vernet like herself, but she recognised that, given Mummy's advancing age, that was unlikely to occur.   

Mycroft was appalled at the cavalier revelation of her scientific ambitions, but he didn't doubt for a moment that, left to her own devices, she would succeed at manipulating me into going along with her plan.  Given the state of affairs among the adults of our acquaintance, Mycroft had no one to turn to for help, so he took matters into his own hands. 

There was a boy who lived on the grounds of Musgrave—the child of the grounds keeper, about my age and the only child I knew outside our family.  You'll have guessed by now that this was Victor Trevor.  Victor and I barely knew each other—he went to school in town and had other friends.  But Mycroft used some means at his disposal to encourage our acquaintance.  He was desperate to ensure that I had some normal relationship in my life—that I might be exposed to the ordinary social conventions largely ignored in our bizarre household, and thus let some fresh air into the claustrophobic confines of our life there. 

His plan worked, for a while.  In the way of small boys everywhere, Victor and I shared an obsession with pirates, and this was all that was necessary for us to become fast friends.  That summer I was hardly ever to be found indoors, preferring to spend all my time down at the river with Victor, exploring the pleasures of ordinary boyhood.

Eurus, however, did not take this development well.  I don't have to describe for you what happened next: you saw the evidence of it for yourself, at the bottom of that well. 

What Mycroft told us about the fire at Musgrave is true, but it isn't the whole truth.  Victor's death had already helped Mycroft convince Uncle Rudy that his little experiment had produced some dire consequences.  The previously charming eccentricities of the Vernet family had been intensified, thanks to his mucking about, into true psychosis.  Their main fear, however, was not Eurus's violent tendencies, but her fixation on me and the "experiment".  Mycroft insisted that we had to be kept apart, lest history repeat itself.  Rudy was indecisive at first, and loathe to act without his sister's approval, but after the fire he followed Mycroft's recommendation to have Eurus immured in the most secure facility he could devise. 

As for my parents, the combined trauma of losing Victor, the house, and their daughter in rapid succession marked a permanent change in them.  They abandoned the idea of "playing aristocrat", and actively pursued a much more ordinary, conventional life.  Mycroft worked with me to delete all memory of Victor and Eurus, and my parents, racked with guilt, went along with his plan, erasing all sign of her from our household.  Mycroft and I were sent off to school with normal children, Mummy cut ties with Rudy, and the whole affair was swept under the rug. 

But Eurus was not so easily contained, it turned out.  Eurus had inherited from her father not only his intelligence, but also his decided genius for self-transformation.  Mycroft referred to it rather dismissively as "cross-dressing", but in fact, our uncle was a master of disguise.  He played early on with taking on feminine forms, and the skills he developed with that hobby served him well in his work as an intelligence operative.  As a little girl, Eurus had always loved playing dress-up with her "uncle" Rudy, and apparently she retained his lessons into adulthood. 

And so it was that she must have first approached me as an adult.  This part of the story is, once again, largely conjecture.  It seems to me that once she succeeded in escaping the confines of Sherrinford, her first goal must have been to find me and seduce me into impregnating her.  I don't know if she came to me as a client or some other form of acquaintance—I have no memory of the encounter that surely happened.  I can only conclude that she found me a more difficult nut to crack than she anticipated.

This too is largely Mycroft's work.  So terrified was he that my sister might enact her plan, I believe he planted in me from an early age a distaste for everything to do with sexual relations.  If I never had sex with a woman, he reasoned, I could avoid accidentally bedding my sister.  Better yet if I avoided men too—he hardly needed the example of Rudy to prove that the line between male and female isn't always obvious. 

So it was that whatever attempt she made must have been thwarted.  It was then, I'm afraid, that she turned to you, John.  I'm not sure what she hoped to achieve with your seduction—perhaps only some deep insight into my personality that might help her in her quest.  Pretending to be your therapist must have had the same rationale. 

I believe that in those incarnations, she determined that she had learned enough about me to make a second attempt at seducing me.  This is when she came to me disguised as Faith.  It was a very clever plan, I have to concede.  She sought me out at a low-point.  I was isolated from friends, abnormally suggestible due to the effects of my drug use, and emotionally vulnerable in the wake of a dear friend's death.  It's not easy to admit this, but in all honesty...  she could have succeeded in her plan that night.  In the state I was in, I would have done almost anything for a scrap of affection.  There were moments during the night we spent together when I felt the thrilling buzz of connexion, and I almost propositioned her myself on a few occasions. 

Each time I began to make an overture, however, she pulled back, breaking the tension between us and shifting my attentions elsewhere.  Mycroft would call me foolishly sentimental, but I've come to believe that my sister took pity on me that night.  Even in her warped mind, she understood that seducing me under such false circumstances would be tantamount to rape, and that wasn't what she wanted.  The sexual conquest, even if it did result in the desired pregnancy, wasn't really what she was seeking—she wanted a human connexion.

And so Eurus returned to Sherrinford and abandoned her disguises.  This time, she wanted me to come to her willingly, and with a full, adult understanding of the implications.  The "game" she set up for us was meant to remind me of the dangerous games of dubious ethics we had played together as children.  It was also designed to remove, once again, the interloper from our family unit.  She needed me to choose between friend and family, and she never doubted for a moment that I would choose to shoot you and re-establish the peculiar intimacy our family bond. 

When I chose to sacrifice myself instead, she realised her miscalculation, and after that the rules of her game shifted.  She recreated the circumstances of Victor's death, but this time helped me to find you.  After that, she appears to have experienced some pangs of conscience.  This, as far as I can tell, is the reason she shut herself off from all forms of language—it was meant as a reassurance that never again would she use her phenomenal powers of verbal suggestion to manipulate the minds of those around her. 

It is because of this that I can confidently tell you that whatever decisions I have made since then have been entirely my own, and not a result of Eurus's unnatural influence.  In all these months, she still has not spoken or written a word to me.  We have, however, communicated extensively during my visits to her in Sherrinford—first through the violin, and then through other physical means.  I've come to understand that her wish for us to conceive a child together is as strong as it ever was, but only if my participation comes willingly, with a complete understanding of the strange legacy we will be continuing. 

It's been approximately thirty-eight weeks since I came to this understanding.  Thirty-eight weeks ago, I realised that I was in a unique position to bestow upon my sister the only gift she ever wanted, and to continue the greatest experiment in human perfectibility ever attempted.  Furthermore, that doing so would not require a sacrifice on my part, but would result in a gift for me, for you, and most of all for Rosie.

You've often regretted that thanks to Mary's death and our subsequent relationship, Rosie was doomed to be raised an only child.  You needn't worry about that any longer.  In a couple of days, if all goes well, I will return with a gift for Rosie—a new playmate, and a lifelong companion.  A little brother, of sorts.

Welcome to the family, John.

 

Love always,

Sherlock

 

**Author's Note:**

> \-- I don't think bees are actually the best insect to study if one is interested in tracking genetic traits through generations, but I had to throw in that little canon nod anyway. ;)  
> \-- credit due to Lord Byron, who somewhat inspired this story by having a baby with his half-sister.  
> \-- I just realized this isn't *strictly* canon compliant because I messed up the timing of Eurus's fake identities. Eurus plays John's therapist *after* playing Faith. oops.


End file.
